Table of Contents

Setting up SSH public/private keys

SSH (Secure Shell) can be set up with public/private key pairs so that you don’t have to type the password each time. Because SSH is the transport for other services such as SCP (secure copy), SFTP (secure file transfer), and other services (CVS – Concurrent Versions System, etc), this can be very convenient and save you a lot of typing. While SSH2 can use either DSA or RSA keys, SSH1 cannot. SSH only does the authentication using RSA or DSA algorithm, the “rest” is encoded using a cipher (like IDEA, DES, Blowfish, etc, etc). SSH2 will also not use patented cypers like IDEA .

Where ‘user’ is the remote systems existing user and ‘123.123.123.123’ is the remote systems IP. The first command will copy all generated keys, but the second command must be run separately for each generated key.

Deciding on which key pair to use

DSA (Digital Signature Algorithm)

RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman)

DSA is faster in signing, but slower in verifying. A DSA key of the same strength as RSA (1024 bits) generates a smaller signature. A RSA 512 bit key has been cracked, but only a 280 DSA key. Also note that DSA can only be used for signing/verification, whereas RSA can be used for encryption/decrypt as well.